Two Offers on the Table: Lining Up the Pay Side by Side
One offer pays 18,000 yuan a month. The other pays 20,000. Straight to the point, the second one looks like an easy 2,000 a month win. But which months actually get paid, what the bonus clause really means, and what either deal looks like once year one is over all change the picture.
A workable habit when comparing pay: tag every piece of money with three answers. Why you get it, which period it covers, and when it actually lands in your account. Once the numbers sit under the same labels, the difference stops being fuzzy.
Start with what's inside the annual figure
Here's a pair of offers for illustration. Everything is pre-tax, and assume you stay a full year and meet the conditions behind the guaranteed salary and the signing bonus.
Company A pays 18,000 a month, guaranteed for 13 months, with no target bonus on top. That's 234,000 in fixed cash for the year.
Company B pays 20,000 a month, guaranteed for 12 months, plus a target bonus of 40,000 and a 20,000 signing bonus. If the bonus lands at target, year one comes to 300,000.
So B looks 66,000 ahead. Write that gap out: 6,000 of it is the base difference, 240,000 versus 234,000. 40,000 is the target bonus, with the actual amount determined by the agreed performance rules. And 20,000 is paid once, at the start, and never again. Each piece comes with its own questions.
On the bonus, ask whose performance counts, yours, your team's, the whole company's. What result does the target number assume? When is it paid? On the signing bonus, when do you actually receive it, and is there a service requirement with a repayment clause if you leave early? On the 13th month at A, is it really unconditional, or tied to some assessment?
Laying the structure out like that beats carrying around "the package is 300,000" as a single vague number.
Run the years through, not just the headline
Same numbers, different outcomes. If B's bonus comes in at zero, first-year cash is 260,000. At target, 300,000. Drop the signing bonus out of year two and you're at 240,000 or 280,000 depending on performance.
Under these assumptions, A’s fixed annual cash is 234,000 yuan in each full year.
B’s fixed annual cash exceeds A’s by 6,000 yuan even with no bonus. The performance bonus and one-time signing payment explain the remaining difference. Comparing these parts separately helps you decide how much you value fixed pay, variable pay and first-year cash relative to later years.
If you start mid-year, build a separate table from your start date to December 31. Ask how the fixed bonus is pro-rated by months worked, whether you're even eligible for the performance bonus in year one, and which month the signing bonus lands. The year total tells you the story of the deal; the month-by-month cash tells you whether rent gets paid when the bills arrive.
Count what the job takes from you besides pay
Next to salary, line up the practical costs: where you'd sit, the commute, travel days, what the actual day looks like, and extra living costs that come with the move or the schedule.
A concrete example: if one job costs you an extra hour of commute on every working day, that's 240 hours over a 240-day year. You won't get those hours back, so decide whether the extra pay buys them. Keep the money in the pay table and the time in its own column, and the trade reads plainly.
Growth is worth making concrete too. Which tasks would you own, who would give you feedback, and what could you show for your time at the end of a year? How to judge whether a lower-paying job is worthwhile has a way of weighing that kind of thing.
If the pitch includes future raises
"We do two review rounds a year", if you hear that, follow it with: when is the first review, what would it be based on, and how is the raise amount set? Those answers describe the plan. Your comparison table still records only the pay already stated in writing.
One arithmetic habit helps. If you take a 20% pay cut to join, you go from 100 to 80, and getting back to 100 takes a 25% raise, not 20%. Doing that math before you accept a lower starting number means you know exactly what you gave up and what you're betting on instead.
Then turn the difference you care about most into an actual ask. You might ask for higher fixed pay, compensation for a bonus you would forgo by changing jobs, or an adjustment to the working arrangement. Stating your expected salary and continuing the negotiation covers putting those on the table.
When the updated offer comes back in writing, recompute everything under the same labels. The concept behind the labeling and side-by-side comparison lives at Compensation structure and like-for-like comparison, and the whole path from reading an offer to agreeing on terms continues at From understanding an offer to agreeing on terms.